3 Software Vendors Who Crushed It With Embedded Analytics

Written by Jordan Zenko on 20 July 2018.

Energize your Application with Embedded Analytics

No two Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are the same. Each differs in what it offers, in its size, in the talent it secures, and in its culture. However, what each ISV shares, is an innate desire and drive to create and develop exceptional products and solutions that are:

Superior to their competition, and

Endeared by their customers.

In order to immediately impact both objectives, ISVs are beginning to recognize that their offerings – while masterfully crafted and proficient at their intended purposes – often lack an analytic component. And as business applications become increasingly data-driven and begin to manage and repurpose massive amounts of data, it’s imperative they acquire the capabilities to track, organize, manipulate and make data accessible as part of the overall user experience. Customers demand the most from the applications they use, and should be empowered with the best access to extensive amounts of underlying data, to truly ensure the product’s value is maximized.

The simplest, and most effective way for ISVs to get their data into the hands of their customers, is by embedding analytics directly into their applications. This will notably strengthen their offering, assist in maintaining a competitive advantage over their counterparts, provide a solid foundation for rapid growth and scalability, and above all else, enable their customers to harness data and discover deeper insights, thus completing the user experience.

Embedded analytics, also known as embedded BI, is the integration of self-service BI tools into commonly used business applications. In other words, your application – be it a reporting solution, cloud solution, Internet of Things solution, etc. – gets all the good stuff associated with a BI application; interactive reporting, dashboards, visual analysis and more. When done well, all these added features will look and work just like your existing business applications, leading to increased adoption rates amongst your customers, as they are already comfortable with your tool.

Awesome applications need awesome embedded analytics. So for the remainder of this blog, we’re going to take a closer look at 3 data-savvy companies who’ve embedded Dundas’ modern business intelligence platform – Dundas BI – and transformed their applications with polished, custom analytics:

Absorb Software provides a thoughtfully designed and highly sophisticated Learning Management System (LMS), which is used by hundreds of customers around the world. As part of their offering, they included a standard reporting component that allowed their customers to analyze and consume data via generic reports.

However, as the business scaled, Absorb Software found that their customers demanded more than simple reporting, and wished for more direct access to their data. In addition to this, their customers clamored for enhanced customization and reporting capabilities, along with the ability to gather actionable insights from the LMS, to bring to life their own specific reporting design and functionality. Their clients were requesting unique data layouts and greater interactivity within their reporting environment, and Absorb Software needed a solution.

The Solution

Absorb Software created a business intelligence module by embedding Dundas BI directly within their LMS, and employed a multi-tenant scenario allowing them to effortlessly create and manage their clients. Each customer would receive access to a rich suite of reporting options, custom built to their specific needs.

The Benefit

Absorb Software enjoyed numerous benefits from this integration, the most prevalent being massive cost savings on complex system maintenance by being able to avoid duplicated work efforts, as Dundas BI automatically adjusted to whomever was using the BI module. In addition to this, they were able to finally provide their clients with cutting-edge, interactive visualizations that drive business critical insights.

Ultimately, Dundas BI armed Absorb Software with a BI module that ensured their client’s satisfaction by significantly augmenting the capabilities of reporting elements in the Absorb admin interface.

Center6 helps North America’s fastest growing homebuilders and developers make smarter, more informed decisions to optimize their entire operations through visual analytics, dashboards, and mobile reporting.

Their customer’s lauded Center6’s product, but wanted more from it, and expressed a need for visually stunning reports that provided the views and interactivity required to gain critical business insights. More importantly, their customer’s had requested Center6 provide an end-to-end solution so they could remain within a single application, ultimately ensuring a superior, more seamless user experience.

The Solution

To meet the demands of their customers, Center6 began researching various BI, analytics and data visualization vendors. The search was on for a solution that could be leveraged within their data environment to augment their customer’s ability to access key insights. Center6 needed a solution that went beyond the ability to white-label obvious elements, and would give them the option to expand its existing functionality and deliver to their external customers’ exact requirements, without being dependent on the software vendor.

Center6 white-labeled Dundas BI and branded it to match their existing offering. This enabled them to enhance their analytics layer by embedding Dundas BI within it.

The Benefit

By harnessing the powering of Dundas BI, Center6 took their application to an entirely different level, further diversified their product portfolio, and satisfied their customer’s reporting and visual needs. They saved money by not developing a solution from scratch, were able to monetize their new data analytics functionality, and enabled their customers to drive more pertinent, business critical insights.

IT Weapons is a leader in secure cloud solutions and managed IT services. They are a trusted advisor in the field of risk reduction, as well as technology infrastructure maintenance costs reduction. IT Weapons provides industry leading expertise in virtual infrastructure, application delivery, network security, storage and backup strategies, and more.

As part of their quarterly process, IT Weapons would generate reports for their clients using a time-consuming, semi-manual process. Not only was this laborious and tedious for those involved, but it was extremely cost-prohibitive. IT Weapons sorely needed a business intelligence platform that would integrate seamlessly into their application and would allow them to create a single set of dashboards for their myriad clients, in order to create complete separation between one another.

The Solution

Rather than cobble together software from multiple vendors to meet their requirements of web integration, white-labeling and branding, self-service metrics, and more; IT Weapon’s partnered with a business intelligence vendor in who delivered on all fronts. Dundas BI was integrated into IT Weapon’s platform to help build a branded, client analytics portal.

The Benefit

The list of benefits for IT Weapons from this integration is lengthy, but perhaps none were more important than the meaningful and deep connections they were able to forge with their clients. By embedding analytics directly within their application, IT Weapons vastly improved the experience by which their data was retrieved and reported upon, which resulted in their existing client satisfaction and new deal win rates skyrocketing.

If you’d like to learn more about these 3 companies, and dig deeper into why they chose Dundas BI as their analytics provider, feel free to check out the full case studies, here:

As you can gather from the above examples, the benefits of embedding analytics directly within a software application are endless. We’ve barely scratched the surface in this blog on what embedded analytics can do for ISVs and their customers. Regardless of the type of deployment, embedded analytics can ultimately help to augment and improve offerings, increase competitive positioning, and bolster customer satisfaction.

If you’re an ISV and are considering adding analytics to your application, I invite you to register for our Jump Start Program. Accelerate your customer-facing, embedded BI projects with free, expert advice from Dundas, and bring your applications to life with beautiful analytics.